Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp@mastodon.social
This account is unused: follow @christianp instead.
Mathematician and koala fan.
http://somethingorotherwhatever.com
I have moved to @henryseg on mathstodon.xyz, a mastodon instance with a clearly superior domain name.
A post to show to anyone asking me why I use Vim instead of some _modern_ chrome-based editor/ide https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
Every time God closes a door he opens an incognito window and then glances around to make sure he's alone
My predecessor's inexplicable love for \; spacers in TeX will never stop confusing, or annoying, me.
Here's how to make every amount up to £3.88 with the fewest coins http://codepen.io/christianp/full/bWGmPg/ https://mastodon.social/media/anUckrHJj6AiNhM_R4I
I've rashly made a database migration which adds a column to a table with like a bajillion rows.
I'll come back tomorrow and see if it worked
"A Unix system administrator of my acquaintance once got curious about what people were putting into /dev/null. I think he also may have had some notion that it would contain secrets or other interesting material that people wanted thrown away. Both of these ideas are stupid, but what he did next was even more stupid: he decided to replace /dev/null with a plain file so that he could examine its contents.
The root filesystem quickly filled up and the admin had to be called back from dinner to fix it. But he found that he couldn't fix it: to create a Unix device file you use the mknod command, and its arguments are the major and minor device numbers of the device to create. Our friend didn't remember the correct minor device number. The ls -l command will tell you the numbers of a device file but he had removed /dev/null so he couldn't use that.
Having no other system of the same type with an intact device file to check, he was forced to restore /dev/null from the tape backups."
i like the idea of using colors to distinguish instances but please consider:
i am colorblind
Things We Have Thrown Into the Lake and What Has Thereby Been Summoned:
) A pineapple: Nothing
) A lover's gift: Regret
) A fish: Friendship with all fish
) A wax sphere: Nothing
) A doll bound in string & hair: Nothing
) A tooth: The Tooth Spirit of the Lake
) A magazine: A forest ranger who asked me to stop littering in the lake
https://mastodon.social/media/mYIbsBs3VlWPQcrUUHw
Menger sponge iteration quadriptych in progress.
it's occurred to me that this is very sensitive to the way I find rational approximations, and changing the accuracy of that moves the spike about quite easily. So that pretty much explains what I saw.
A user wants my algebraic simplifier to spot real numbers which can be written in the form (fraction)*π^p. My first instinct is there'll be far too many false positives, even if we restrict to small p.
I did some testing (http://codepen.io/christianp/full/MpNExZ/) and weirdly, the false positive rate spikes at 50% when denominator of the fraction is limited to 1000. What's going on? That's nowhere near the good convergents for π, 333/106 and 355/113.
Instead of typing `rm -rf`, type `rm -fr` and call it 'French delete', with all the Francophobic connotations of 'the French disease'
New post on the #aperiodical, by me: Timetabling choreography with maths http://aperiodical.com/2017/04/timetabling-choreography-with-maths/ https://mastodon.social/media/8PxlZmIj7ySP6vQB6U0
Augustus de Morgan tooting
https://mastodon.social/media/gHuvnqL6UYVTSUnRGZk
